


want me to kick his ass?

by sentichefuoripiove



Category: Grey's Anatomy
Genre: Angst, F/M, Missing Scene, andrew isn't even in it, pre 15x24
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-08
Updated: 2019-09-08
Packaged: 2020-10-12 18:53:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,963
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20569205
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sentichefuoripiove/pseuds/sentichefuoripiove
Summary: She feels Alex tense up against her side, and after a second where it seems like he wants to fight the gesture, he lets out a deep, slow breath, and with that most of the tension in his body leaves him. Meredith knows that if she were to look at him, she would still find his brow knitted in worry, so she doesn’t.Alex is worried about Jo, Meredith is stressed about Andrew. As always, they rely on each other.immediately pre 15x24





	want me to kick his ass?

“Mer.”

A groan. 

“Meredith, wake up” Jo shoves her, and Meredith opens just one eye, gives the other woman a pointed, sleep-clouded look before turning on her other side, burying her face in the couch cushions. 

“Meredith, I am not telling you again, you have to go to work.”

“She’s not going into work, she’s gonna stay here with you” Alex’s voice comes from somewhere across the room, commanding if not a little menacing. 

“No, she’s not. I don’t need her to” Jo sneers, and Meredith doesn’t need to open her eyes to know that Alex is visibly flinching at his wife’s tone, doesn’t need to look at him to see all the dark thoughts crossing his mind right now. 

“_She_ is staying, Jo” Meredith pipes up, still not moving a muscle, voice muffled by the couch. 

“Fine, stay. Just don’t bug me” Jo gives in angrily. Meredith can hear her make her way to the bathroom, all but slamming the door behind her. 

Meredith knows she should get up, maybe go after her friend or at least start making herself useful around the house, but the couch is just _so comfortable_, and she hasn’t had a full night sleep in almost a week, and who says she needs to get up to keep an eye on Jo? So she burrows herself deeper onto the couch, and she is just starting to drift off again when a pair of hands roughly picks her legs up by the calves and drops them on the floor, startling her. The couch wobbles when another body plops down on it, closely followed by a heavy sigh, and it doesn’t take a genius to guess who it is.

_Alright, here we go_, she thinks, awake again.

“She’s gonna be fine, Alex” she reassures him softly, pulling herself up from under the thick blanket, “she just needs to mope a little longer and then she’ll be fine.” She’s been telling him for days now, trying to convince not only him but herself too. As much as she doesn’t want to admit it she knows there’s something wrong with Jo, something that feels almost too _familiar_, in a very bad way. 

She also knows that Alex recognises it too, so there’s not much she can do to distract him from it, except telling him that _she’s gonna be fine_ with as much conviction as she can muster, and hope for the best.

“This is not moping, Mer, it’s serious. I don’t know what happened and she won’t tell me and I’m… scared”, the last word is drawn out in a shaky breath, his features crunched up in pain, and Meredith wishes she could say this is the first time she’s seen him like this, but images of him with this exact face, from years and years ago, flash before her eyes and the only thing she can do is loop her arm around him, draw him close until he can rest his head on her shoulder. 

She feels Alex tense up against her side, and after a second where it seems like he wants to fight the gesture, he lets out a deep, slow breath, and with that most of the tension in his body leaves him. Meredith knows that if she were to look at him, she would still find his brow knitted in worry, so she doesn’t.

This, too, feels freakishly familiar. 

After a while the silence becomes too much and, subconsciously bothered by the absence of the shower running, Meredith untangles herself from Alex and the blanket, pads over to the still closed bathroom door. Her knock and worried question of _’Is everything alright in there?’_ are met with Jo’s tired _’I’m fine Meredith, leave me alone’_, and when she turns around Alex’s sad and worried expression is probably just a mirror of her own face. 

She lets herself fall on the couch again with a deep sigh that matches Alex’s from earlier almost comically.

“What’s with you anyway?” he asks her gruffly, “I’m glad you offered, but Linc could have stayed with Jo today.”

“Jo’s my friend too, I can help” she explains in what she hopes passes for a nonchalant tone.

“I know you want to help, but shouldn’t you be, I don’t know, out with DeLuca sucking face instead of getting depressed by staying here?”

She recoils at that, her breath audibly hitching in her throat. Alex turns to look at her, narrows his eyes.

“What did he do”, more of a statement than a question.

“Nothing” she says, defensive, the high pitch of her voice doing very little to disguise the fact that she is lying.

“Don’t bullshit me Mer, just tell me” he presses with an impatient tone and plenty of eye-rolling. “He probably did something stupid like propose.”

“He did not propose”, she argues, still high-pitched and a little offended on Andrew’s behalf. She still can’t quite wrap her head around what _actually_ happened, but give the guy some credit.

Alex studies her for a second, trying to pry the truth from the panic in her eyes. “Ok, he didn’t propose. Then what, did he say he loves you or some crap?”

She holds his stare for as long as she can, defiant, but eventually her eyes widen in admission, and she sags into the couch, whining behind the hands that are now covering her face.

She can’t even bring herself to say it out loud. Not that she needs to anyway.

“He did?” Alex exclaims, inappropriate (considering his own situation) mirth in his voice. He lets out a dark laugh as he informs her that “oh man, you are so screwed.”

She groans, letting her head fall to the back of the couch.

“What did you say? No, wait, I know… You ran away” he snickers, and she turns her head to shoot him a deadly glare.

“When did this happen?”

“Three days ago. After Gaby’s surgery.”

“And, I’m just guessing again here, you haven’t spoken to him since, right?”

She goes silent again, is back to stare right in front of her, trying really hard to ignore the way Alex is studying her. It’s not like she needs to talk, she knows _he knows_ what happened, and why it happened, but not having to say it out loud is just a small consolation in the face of the monumental mess she’s got herself into.

_Andrew loves her._

Like, really _loves_ her.

She doesn’t know what to do.

She says it at loud: “I don’t know what to do.”

“You need to man up and talk to him.”

She snorts her dissent, “Look who’s talking. When did you ever own up to your feelings.”

“Don’t give me that” he scolds her, “I grew up, and so did you.”

Meredith scoffs, turns her attention of a stray thread on the blanket, in an attempt to avoid Alex’s pointed gaze.

“Mer” he presses, “you are different too, you’re not a tramp on tequila anymore” he tells her carefully, quietly. “You can’t keep expecting him to figure you out without telling him anything.”

This is not what she expected him to say, and her head snaps to look at him, surprise in her eyes. He is right, of course, but the phrase, coming out of what feels like a lifetime ago, is what hits her like a gut punch. 

“It was _whores_ on tequila, not tramps” she tries to play cool, but there’s a smirk on her lips because, somehow, the memory of her and Cristina still makes her laugh.

“Whatever” he shrugs, back to his usual gruffness, “you’re not that person anymore and you know it.”

The loose thread on the blanket is suddenly very interesting again.

“I thought we went over this already. You said you were ready to move on” Alex tries to reason, “you said it was nice to have the option again. You want all the mushy crap, you have to be able to handle it when someone offers.”

She doesn’t respond to that, and after a beat she feels him nudge her with his elbow, until she turns to look at him.

“Do you? Want the mushy crap?”

“I guess so” she tries, tentatively, and she watches him huff and shift uncomfortably on the couch.

“Well, you can stay here until you sort all of _that_ out. That’s how good a friend I am.”

That makes her chuckle, and the smiles forming on both their lips quickly fall when Jo finally decides to get out of the bathroom, shooting them an angry glare. Without sparing a word to them, she makes a beeline to the bed, immediately disappearing under the comforter. 

Having another person in the room (even if it’s Jo, who they both love, and even if she’s clearly not interested in anything they’re saying) breaks them out of their sharing bubble, and they spend a few minutes in silence, each mulling over their own problems. Until Alex speaks up again, quieter.

“You really aren’t gonna say it back?”

“No, I ca- No, not yet”, and that in and on itself is more of an admission of her feelings than what she was aware she was ready to give.

Alex, mercifully, just nods without saying anything.

“And what are you gonna do about _this?_” she shoots back, head barely nodding toward the bed behind them.

“I don’t know, I’ll think of something.”

She nods in understanding, their eyes locked as she tries to tell him everything she knows he isn’t prepared to hear said out loud. _It will be fine. If it won’t, we’ll figure it out._

“You’d think that at this point our lives would be less messed up, huh?” he says, darkly, and she offers half a chuckle and a sad smile as he finally stands up to go to work.

He places a kiss on her forehead, and she doesn’t move as she listens to him approaching Jo, whispering something in her ear that sounds a lot like _I love you, I’ll see you later_ before he eventually walks out, dragging the door closed behind him.

Meredith waits another couple of minutes before getting up, wanting to make sure Jo has actually fallen asleep again. As she joins the other woman in bed, thinking that _maybe I can get away with never speaking to him again, it’s totally doable_, she lets herself think about who was in her bed just last week: Andrew, who had pressed himself against her side and sleepily mocked her for her snoring until he made her giggle.

Suddenly, she very much doesn’t feel like avoiding him anymore, and _maybe I should just call him and tell him right now_. The new thought is followed by another memory from a month ago when Andrew, who had caught her staring at him in his sleep one night, had curled himself around her and silently waited until she was ready to talk about the nightmare that had woken her.

It’s a while before she manages to actually fall asleep. Her mind keep bouncing back and forth between wanting to call him right now and wanting to avoid him forever, and in between those thoughts Cece’s voice somehow gets stronger and stronger, _if you don’t squeeze every ounce of love out of this life I’ll haunt you from the grave_, isn’t that what she said? 

She hasn’t thought about it in months, making the actual leap into dating Andrew somehow felt like keeping her promise all on its own. Apparently, she hadn’t thought about what would come next.

Actual love. Actual life.

As she finally closes her eyes, Alex’s words from earlier ring even truer than they had minutes ago.

_Yeah, you’d think our lives would be less messed up by now._

**Author's Note:**

> is this a merluca fic? a jolex one? merlex? don't ask me, idek anymore
> 
> but i had this angsty dialogue in my head and if i have to suffer so do you
> 
> let me know what you think!


End file.
